As mentioned in my post yesterday, in Business Development at the BBC we partner with a range of companies in the digital and technology space to keep the BBC at the cutting edge of emerging communications, technologies and services.

As well as using ‘behind the scenes’ technologies and working with companies to enhance our own products we also partner with device manufacturers and platforms to reach as wide as possible an online audience in the UK.

Mobile is increasingly important as a way for our audiences to access our services. BBC iPlayer and BBC News are already available on Apple (iOS), Android and Blackberry platforms.

Today I can let you know that we have signed a deal with Microsoft that will enable us to bring BBC iPlayer to the Windows phone platform.

We will be releasing a shortcut to BBC iPlayer in the near future which will be available in the Windows Phone Store, enabling the BBC iPlayer website to work on Windows Phone 7.5 and 8 via a live tile.

This shortcut will wrap the BBC iPlayer mobile website together with our media player. Hopefully these and other developments will help to expand our online reach further. Our latest figures show that over 650 different device types can access BBC iPlayer.

Working with the industry in ways like this helps our digital services reach more of the UK’s online population and gives our audiences ever increasing ways to access BBC services.

We will keep you updated on the launch and more in the coming months on the blog and elsewhere.

There are two correct 'open' approaches to this:1. Add a new streaming format that's natively supported by Windows Phone, publish information about it, and accept/hope that other apps than just the iPlayer will be streaming legally-available content.2. Add support for existing stream formats to Windows Phone - and make that support available to other app developers on the WP, too.It doesn't sound like you're doing either right now - will you be doing so in the future?

if the BBC are rightly committed to extending its reach to as many license fee payers as possible why on earth have you withdrawn the service to symbian users , that has been working perfectly well to date, without any warning...I feel the BBC should compensate me for the replacement of my phone, which I decided to purchase precisely for its abiility to access iplayer via its browser..I am not aware that the BBC advised me anywhere that it would withdraw its service to platforms without notice.

This is great news. Well done BBC. this was a big missing APP on the Windows Phone. Could you add a download feature for Radio as well as TV. If not Windows Phone Users should check out episodic|audio from the APP store. It finds and downloads iPlayer radio content to listen to off line. It is excellent. - I would love to Beta test the iPlayer if possible

We won't be building a native application for Windows Phone devices at this stage, but will instead be launching with a compatible version of our popular mobile website, accessed via a shortcut tile on the device.

We want to make sure it is as easy as possible for you to find (and use) iPlayer on your mobile device, so this shortcut tile, which will be available on the Windows Phone Store, will give you access to your favourite BBC programmes on iPlayer with just one tap. By taking this approach, we are reflecting what we have done on other platforms such as BlackBerry.

Why does it always take BBC & MSFT so long to come to a commercial agreement for Windows? Android and iOS don't have this problem. Granted they have the greater footprint but in this age of mobile communications i don't consider popularity a valid excuse.